NYTimes (New York Times)

When the venerable New York Times creates a news reader application for the design-centric iPhone platform, you expect Quality. You expect that the experience of browsing through some of the best news articles written in the USA will be easy, seamless, and a delight.

And it pretty much is. The front page allows you to quickly view news headlines (which, thanks to the excellent Times editorial staff, are always accurate to the stories they represent) and scroll quickly down the list to older stories you may have missed. My main complaint about this page is that the associated thumbnail photos arrive slowly or not at all, even when I’m connected via WiFi. (See the screenshot– empty thumbnails appear as grey boxes.)

Photo Browser

This is an unexpected joy of the NYTimes application. I can quickly get an overview of the most interesting photos of the day. But often, I can only get the overview. If I actually click on any of the beautiful thumbnail images, I’m disappointed by a “Loading” screen that shows for a few minutes, and the full-size image fails to load. (Yes, this happens even when I’m connected via WiFi to one of the fattest broadband pipes in the world.) My gut instinct as a developer tells me that this is not a problem with the iPhone app software itself, but with the backend server that the Times is using.

Conclusion

The NYTimes reader works well, and is a joy to use, when it works. It seems that it may have already been overwhelmed by its own popularity.